Today, we cross Australia. The University of
Houston's College of Engineering presents this
series about the machines that make our
civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity
created them.

In 1787, the British dumped
a boatload of prisoners in Sydney Harbor, near an
inlet Captain Cook had named Botany Bay. The
settlement soon turned from a penal colony into a
flourishing city. Only 32 years later Sydney's
citizens had reached the point where they could
begin erecting a major cathedral.

But British Australia was limited to a 50-mile
strip along the east coast. That was all there was
until 1836. Then settlers founded a new city on the
southern indentation of Australia. They called it
Adelaide after a little-remembered queen.

Australia extended 2400 miles to the west of Sydney
and 1700 miles to the north of Adelaide. All that
was a vast, inaccessible wilderness. But humans are
inquisitive. Naturally, the British had to know
what lay beyond those tiny settled patches. They
began a series of explorations every bit as
difficult as Lewis and Clark's.

The first explorers stayed near the coastline. Then
they began striking out toward the center of the
subcontinent. One explorer, John Macdouall Stuart,
had been part of an expedition that got halfway
across Australia in 1845. In 1858 he organized the
first of six attempts to get from Adelaide to the
northern tip. After the first three attempts had
failed, the government offered a £10,000
prize for the first person who crossed Australia
south to north.

Stuart set out again in 1860, only to be turned
back by "hostile Aborigines". Meanwhile, others
died trying to win the prize. Stuart organized a
fifth failed attempt in 1861. That October his
group made the attempt that finally reached the
Indian Ocean in July, 1862. It'd taken four years
of trying, but they'd done it.

My interest in that journey was triggered just
recently. By an odd set of circumstances, I've been
in touch with astronaut Andrew Thomas up on the Mir
Space Station. He told me his
great-great-grandfather was a naturalist with the
last Stuart expedition. When Thomas made his first
shuttle flight, he carried the steel "flint" his
forebear had used as a fire starter on that
journey.

The comparisons and contradictions of that act are
mind-boggling. Thomas is as far out on today's
frontier as his great-great-grandfather was 136
years ago. But when Mir's orbit crosses Australia,
it takes only six minutes to make the journey that
once took nine months. That "flint" was a neolithic
technology riding on a vehicle that Stuart would've
found unthinkable.

And as for Thomas, his frontier isn't about space
travel at all. It's about rewriting medicine by
removing gravity. He's up there studying kidney
stones, protein growth, the human immune system,
and breast cancer cells. He's up there tacitly
showing us that human understanding is being recast
when we step clear of gravity -- when we leave the
flat earth on which we've lived ever since we were
no more than primordial cells.

I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.

(Theme music)

My sources for this episode have been a variety of
entries from the 1897, 1911, and 1970
Encyclopaedia Britannica and from the British
Dictionary of National Biography, as well as
both e-mail and telephone communications with Dr.
Andrew Thomas on Mir.

Click on the thumbnail above for a
full-size map of Australia from the 1897
Encyclopaedia Britannica. This map
represents our knowledge of the geography of
Australia at a time somewhat less than 35 years
after the epic journey of McDouall Stuart's
group. Adelaide is in the lower right corner of
South Australia. The city of Darwin was
yet to be built, but you can just make out Point
Darwin on the upper left side of North
Australia